 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE, covering EMC World 2015, brought to you by EMC, Brocade and VCE. Welcome back to EMC World, everybody. I'm Dave Vellante with wikibon.com, wikibon.org, Silicon Angles, theCUBE, we go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. Jonathan Siegel is here, along with Peter Smales, there with the product marketing group, within the core technologies group at EMC, we just heard from Steven Manley. Jonathan, Peter, welcome to theCUBE. It's great to be here. It's great to be here. So Jonathan, I was saying we were just talking to Steven about architectures and the like, so what's going on at the core technologies group? A lot, obviously. I tweeted out today, it's the biggest division, it's the most profitable division of EMC, it's where the bread and butter, the bread is buttered. So give us the update. Absolutely, so really what, it's a division, but I think more importantly, it's a division with products that are integrated, right? And so I think the power of the portfolio is something you're going to hear time and time again, I think, over the course of the next couple of years. And that's because what Guy Churchwood has done is he's brought products together for a purpose, right? And so for example, at the end of the day, what we're helping customers do is really simplify and automate their existing applications so they can start to transfer a lot of their time, if you will, right, and their investment on future applications. And so what we've done is, by leveraging some of the existing investments we had today, for example, VMAX, we've put together with products like Extreme I.O., and I'll get into that in a moment. Wow, there's actually great integration there to help our customers. We've also taken data protection and ensure that no matter where the data is, whether it's on-prem or off-prem, it's protected, right? And we're also making sure that there's always a path to the cloud, right? So regardless of the primary platform that customers are using today, whether it's VMAX or VMAX or Extreme I.O., we're investing to make sure that there's a path to the cloud. And by doing that, we're leveraging recent investments that we've made, for example, with Maginadix, as well as other products like Cloud Array from Trent Strato. So it's taking products together for a purpose to help our customers solve the most critical problems as they're transitioning from platform two to really platform 2.5. So, Peter, that's a good high-level overview. Can you take us through sort of the products, take it down to the product level? What should people be paying attention to here at EMC World? Sure, a couple things. And I'll walk across the board and then I'll turn back over to you. You can double-click on some of the primary stuff. I can double-click on some of the data protection, but pick up on John's point. Sort of three key themes, simplify and automate, right? Paths to the cloud, data protection everywhere. If you look at what we talked about on the primary side from a simplify and automate, all about VMAX, you can double-click on that. But it's all about not only best-of-reach storage with Extreme I.O. for all flash, with VMAX, with VNX, it's also the software-inherent capabilities of being a data services platform to automate that. Path to the cloud, news to the cloud array, as well as with cloud boost, and we can double-click on both of those. And then from a data protection everywhere standpoint, big news with the 9500, with the new DD9500, but really more on secret sauce or on software on data protection. So that's at 30,000 feet, and we can kind of take that in whatever direction we want to go. Well, let's unpack that, because as Stephen said, you can't do a four-hour keynote. We can't do a four-hour CUBE interview, but we can go for 2025. Whatever you want, I love you, we're available. Well, let's start at the top. Yeah, we can. Let's start with VMAX. All right, we've got two cubes. Let's just keep going all day. Three days of coverage with the CTD. So let's start at the top. VMAX, it sounds like VMAX, you're making VMAX sort of this asset play where you can deliver storage services through VMAX, any storage services, if that's what the customer wants to do. Jonathan, maybe you could take us through that strategy. Yeah, we'll put. So when we introduced the VMAX 3 last year, last fall, it was the first, and still is, Enterprise Data Service Platform, okay? And what that means essentially, I think is really important, is that we've separated the Enterprise Data Services software, right, if you will, from the underlying platform. So just like you said there, so that enables us, it really sets us up for today's announcement, was the ability to actually extend the trusted data services of VMAX, for example, SRDF, Synchronous Replication, the ability to manage my service level objective, protect point, right, direct backup to data domain. Those are data services, right, that VMAX that can run. And with today's announcement, which is called fast.x, it's the next generation of tiering. What that allows us to do is actually start to take those data services that are on top, and make those available to other platforms, other classes of storage underneath. It could be, for example, ExtremeIO, it could be other EMC products, it could be the cloud. And so that's really exciting, right? So that gives us customers a whole new way to think about how they can hyper consolidate their existing tier 2.5 infrastructure. So if I love VMAX, my processes are hardened around VMAX, I can now bring in other services, surround them with the VMAX code base, reliability, availability, serviceability, and carry on. That's sort of the strategy there, right? Exactly right. What about the customers as I? Sounds good, but I want to go in a different direction. What options does that customer? We have a lot of customers, we have a lot of options here. So again, so it's really about leveraging the trust, if you will, of the trusted data services of VMAX 3 and extending them out. So customers have a lot of choices. They can run VMAX 3 standalone. They can also, in announcing today, integration with Extreme I.O. You could actually take, so Extreme I.O.s of all flash array is extremely good at inline data reduction, right? So customers may have workloads that benefit highly from data reduction, inline data reduction. You could actually run that Extreme I.O. as a diamond tier within the VMAX 3 system, right? And manage it as a service. That's what's really important here is that what we're giving customers, and one of that I think really the key differentiators and customer values of VMAX 3 is enabling customers to manage essentially IT in their infrastructure as a service, right? Ensuring that we can meet the performance levels and meet the data protection levels, meet the availability levels of the workloads that are running behind it. Okay, and then on the data protection side, you've got a new product we heard today. It was, I think it was, Jeremy or somebody said, just think of it as double everything. Maybe it was David Goulden. Double everything. So let's double click into double everything. Yeah, it's actually better than that. That's double everything versus our own previous stuff. Relative to the competition, it's even better. So, very brief context. This notion of data protection everywhere. What is data protection everywhere? You'll hear us talk about that a lot. What it means is customers deploy and consume data and applications in a variety of different ways. Traditional on premise. They run virtualized infrastructure. They run in hybrid cloud environments. They have applications and data in the cloud. We have to deliver solutions to provide data protection across that entire. That sounds good. People want to know, is that feasible? Absolutely, and I'll talk about the proof points right behind that. The second point is that around SLAs. They have to be able to deliver SLAs across all of those from availability through archiving. So what do we announce today? Hardware always gets sort of the top billing. So we announced the new DD9500, which is our next gen. Resets the bar from a performance and scalability standpoint. You heard David talk about sort of double everything from a competitive standpoint. It's 1.6x the performance. It's 4x the scalability of our closest competitors. We reset the bar from a purpose-built backup appliance. But the real news, the important message is really the secret sauce is all around software. So the box always gets the headlines, but the secret sauce of everything we're doing with data protection is about software. So we've been a number of announcements on that front as well. DDOS 5.6, 16% performance boost across the entire portfolio. Expanded ecosystem of applications with big data for Hadoop and NoSQL deployments. That's within the traditional backup. Beyond that, we introduced ProtectPoint, the next rev of ProtectPoint, expanding our ecosystem of support around Oracle, SAP, and DB2 support. So direct integration from primary to protection storage. That's all powered by software. As well, Project Falcon. Project Falcon is a preview of a software-only version of data domain. That is monumental. And that's why we're previewing it, because think down the road, software-only deployments of DD, rapid deployment of remote office, branch office support, cloud service providers being able to deploy, cloud bursting for data protection, all enabled through data domain software. So Falcon is your software-defined version of data protection? Correct, it's a preview of the software-only version of data domain. And the concept is run it on the so-called commodity hardware? Check. That's exactly right. Because you're tracking the functionality out of the data domain that's been locked in the box and then saying, okay, that's the statement of direction that you're... That's exactly right. Because we want to unlock more rapid deployments, new use cases, different price points. It gives customers a whole new different way of looking at this, and back to the whole data protection everywhere. That touches across, we've got on-prem, covered pretty well. You go into virtual environments, you can see a software-only DD in that environment, absolutely. You go to hybrid cloud, you go to a born in the cloud. So I want to come back to the customer challenges, Jonathan. When you talk to EMC customers, they say, love EMC, great service, great products. We just got a lot of them. And I've heard you guys talk about integration. And it's right at the heart of the core technologies groups. You got a, Joe Tucci says it best. It's better to have overlap than it is to have gaps. Well, you got some overlap. So it sounds like a big theme is integration. What problems are you trying to solve with that integration? And what's the sort of journey look like? As a customer, what can I expect if I'm a customer of, say, VMAX, VNX, I got data domain, should I be thinking about Vplex? Help me sort of squint through that complexity. Sure. So one thing just to pick up where Peter just was too, is the software defined. So actually we announced today the next step of Project Liberty. Project Liberty is it was a virtualized- I'm sorry, Project what? Project Liberty from last year. Yeah, so- Freedom. Freedom, right? Free the software from the hardware. Is it really the concept? So we announced today the availability of VVNX, virtualized version of VNX Community Edition. It's available today for free on EMC.com. Very similar to Project Falcon. This is available today to our existing customers or any prospects or even sales folks that want to use it. And what it allows customers to do for non-production purposes, the ability to actually spin up virtualized versions of VNX, right? And run it on any, they don't need purpose-built hardware, if you will. And this has been really popular already with our existing beta customers that have been using this. This allows them, for test dev purposes, to basically spin up virtualized versions to really speed applications to the cycles, for example, right? Application development cycles. For example, one customer I talked to last week, they actually, this guy wanted to make sure that every one of his developers had his own virtualized version of VNX to ensure that they could actually test out the replication with the same user experience that customers- that the application would have later on to speed the application development cycle. And then once the product, once their application's ready to go in production, they can move it into a production version of a VNX, for example. So just getting back to simplify and automate, we're really giving our customers what they've been asking for, was the ability to actually more cost-effective, you deploy EMC's data services and products, to help them speed the delivery of their applications. So we should think of this portfolio as coming together. And I mean, I'm sure it's not going to happen all at once, but help us take me through the journey of us customer. What should I expect in the next, let's say, six, 12, 18 months in terms of that integration? Convince me that I should stay with these products and you're going to put me on that journey, if you would. I think in any customer environment today, you're going to have a lot of workloads, right? And I think, as I was mentioning earlier, and those workloads need to be, they have a number of requirements in terms of performance, availability, cost effectiveness to manage, et cetera. And so what we've done is, and again, the power of the portfolio, we're helping our customers. If they're smaller customers, for example, they might use a VNX, right, to run their mixed workloads. Larger customers might start to look at leveraging pairs of VMAX or Stream.io or the combination of the two to essentially deliver on the best performance at the lowest possible cost. And we're able to, and I think very importantly, we're able to automate and manage all of that, right? All integrated with Viper. We haven't mentioned Viper here, but Viper is the user interface, if you will, the service catalog. So as an application developer or DBA wants to ensure that they have the right level of service for their application they want to bring online, our systems, for example, can make sure that that service level could be met and then monitored to ensure it's met, regardless of the underlying infrastructure. So we're really trying to make it transparent what's behind those applications. So whether it's VMAX or, go ahead. No, I was just going to expand on you. I mean, if you kind of net that out, to your question, you look at the integration. I mean, at the end of the day there's no silver bullet, right? There's no magic bullet from an application workload standpoint, whether it's data protection, whether it's primary storage. At the end of the day, you've got to have a best-of-breed portfolio strategy. We've got that. Okay, that's not going to change. Extreme, VMAX, VNX, right on down the line. We've got a great best-of-breed strategy. The key is then around all the automation that John was talking about. We've got proof points to speak to that today. So back to proof points to the customer. We've got those today. On the data protection side, same thing. It's all about tighter integration with protection and infrastructure. So we introduced protect point today. You'll see that ecosystem expand. You heard about Extreme.io. One of the key differentiators there is around replication. That's powered by RecoverPoint. So another good example of the short-term integration. So I think what you'll see directly the journey is you're going to continue to see us have a best-of-breed portfolio and you're going to continue to see us build more and more leverage, which ultimately is driving that simplification of the infrastructure. Asset leverage for the customer. Right, exactly. We've been talking to a bunch of customers, and you're right, we were out of time. We haven't even touched on, we barely touched on Viper. We didn't talk about Vplex, RecoverPoint, protect point. Then you've got VMware, you've got OpenStack, you've got Hyper-V. We've got Cloud. We've got Cloud. We've got Cloud. All kinds of integrations that you've got to support. Massive portfolio, substantial R&D effort. Yes. To make all this stuff work. Great job building competitive products. We're getting the hook. I'm sorry. Getting the hook, all right. Jonathan, Peter, thanks very much. Well, thanks for the time. We really appreciate it. We appreciate it. We're having a appreciate it. Keep right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. We're live from EMC World. This is Dave Vellante. I'll be back with John Furrier right after this break.